Tangaroa and the Fish That Became the Islands

When light first entered the world, Tangaroa was afraid.

The darkness between his parents had been everything he knew — the darkness was him, in a sense, or he was the darkness: the god of the sea, which absorbs light rather than reflecting it, which is darkness all the way down regardless of what the surface shows. When Tāne straightened his legs and forced the sky away, when the first light came in sideways and the world became a place of surfaces and distances and forms you could actually see, Tangaroa ran.

He ran into the water, because water is what he is.

He took many living things with him. The fish followed him because they had nowhere else to go. But the reptiles — the lizards and the tuatara and the creatures between scales and skin — could not decide. They were neither fish nor land animals. They paused at the water’s edge while Tangaroa called them in and Tāne called them back.

The division happened at that moment: the fish went in, the reptiles turned back. Tūtewehiwehi, the ancestor of reptiles, chose land. Ikatere, the ancestor of fish, chose the sea. Tangaroa was furious — he had lost some of his dependents to his brother. Tāne was equally irritated: his forests were being raided by Tangaroa’s creatures every time a fish-eating bird went to sea.

This is the Māori explanation for why there is constant conflict between the forest domain and the sea domain.

The fisherman who cuts a canoe from a kauri tree in Tāne’s forest and launches it on Tangaroa’s ocean is committing a small act of territorial violation every time. He knows this. He performs the prayers that acknowledge it — the karakia that recognize Tāne’s ownership of the timber, Tangaroa’s ownership of the water, the navigator’s own position as a negotiator between the two. The canoe is a peace agreement renewed at every launch.

Tangaroa’s domain is vast. The Pacific Ocean holds the largest single volume of water on Earth’s surface. His fish — the whale, the shark, the tuna, the flying fish, the species nobody has named — fill a world of comparable complexity to the forest. He is not a lesser god for having lost the reptiles to Tāne. He simply has different dependents than he might have had, and a different relationship with his brother: a permanent cool between them, the kind of permanent cool that occurs in families when a line is drawn and neither side will cross it.

The sea that surrounds every island in the Pacific is Tangaroa’s body. When a wave breaks on the shore, that is Tangaroa reaching into Tāne’s territory. When the forest leans out over the cliff and the roots press down into the saltwater rock, that is Tāne reaching into Tangaroa’s. The shoreline is not a fixed boundary but a permanently contested one, each god pressing slightly into the other’s zone, a slow argument that has been running since the world’s first day.

The fisherman goes out before dawn. He makes his prayers. He launches the canoe from Tāne’s materials into Tangaroa’s water. He takes what Tangaroa allows him to take. He comes back to shore and steps from Tangaroa’s ocean into Tāne’s forest and the day begins again.

The argument between the brothers continues without resolution.

The fish swim.

The kauri grows.